State Hate: The Fifty State Smackdown
Some observations:
- This is a pretty unscientific poll, obviously, but it’s all in good fun.
- Some of this may be based on college sports rivalries. I would guess Texas naming Oklahoma, for example, because otherwise, I’m not sure how much time Texas spends thinking about Oklahoma compared to California or Massachusetts. (Or Louisiana, though those feelings aren’t negative.)
- Similarly, given that South Carolina named Ohio State I would assume that these tallies were taken during the run-up to the college football invitational tournament where Clemson and Ohio State were paired off.
- Meanwhile, the nation’s two largest states — California and Alaska — named Texas, the state with the largest ego.
- Florida is the only state I can find that named itself.
- Hawaii hates no one while New Jersey hates everyone.
- No one hates Minnesota.
- With the aforementioned exception of South Carolina, the directional states named each other. North and South Dakota named one another, North Dakota named South, and West Virginia named Virginia which named West Virginia.
On a tangential note, here is a video that captured my daughter’s interest. I didn’t guess who the final two would be though in retrospect I should have.
United States Territory Wars
State hate image from @mdrache on Twitter.
Upon reflection, my expectations were that while West Virginia hated Virginia, Virginia would hate Maryland more, home of the hemisphere’s worst automobile drivers. To Virginia, West Virginia is more of a “I don’t think of you at all”.Report
I had guessed the same thing. Might have been true a decade ago when there was a red/blue (or red/purple) thing going on between the two.Report
You are surely incorrect, as the worst drivers I have encountered all had Rhode Island plates on their cars.Report
I don’t believe that Florida hates itself. I know people from Florida. They have too much proud dysfunction to hate themselves.Report
I think it’s the Disney parts of the state that hate the panhandle.
And vice-versa.Report
I’m amused by how the whole of the western states hate CAReport
A couple decades ago Colorado would have had Texas as most hated state instead of California. Me? I’m old school. I hate Nebraska with a passionate intensity don’t even get me startedReport
The California Diaspora in the western states has been a thing for more than 30 years.
There’s a definite “familiarity breeds contempt” effect. Back when I was fooling with interstate migration and cluster analysis, many of the pairs of states in this post were also the pairs in my results that had large relative migration back and forth (eg, the two Dakotas, Iowa/Nebraska, Texas/Oklahoma, Indiana/Kentucky).Report
As a former SoCal guy moved to PDX, I have found that the hate (at least here) is pretty much reserved for folks who move here from the Bay Area, and that’s driven by tech-money arrogance. When I announce that I moved here from L.A., the usual reaction I get is, “Oh, that’s cool.” Either SoCal folks are actually kind of okay, or they’re too superficial for an actual Northwesterner to bother hating upon.Report
Yeah, the wife and I were both very circumspect about how we told our origin stories. I was actually born in WA and mentioned that, while she, having been born in MI didn’t actually talk about that, but where she works, a very old Oregon institution. I was a while before we mentioned we were from the Bay.Report
There’s an notable absence of reciprocity in the great lakes states. Minnesota hates Wisconsin, which hates Illinois, which hates Indiana, which hates Kentucky, which hates Tennessee who – finally – returns the hate-favor. That’s Midwestern-nice for ya!Report
In case anyone’s wondering, Georgia, at least my part of Georgia, generally tends to hate on Florida because people from Florida often do not know how to drive. Curves and hills utterly baffle them. They sometimes completely freak when driving in north-ish Georgia…not even the Appalachian part of it, but just the slightly-hilly Piedmont, where Atlanta is. This would also presumably be the reason why people in north Alabama hate them. (This is also true of drivers from South Georgia, but complaining about ‘Florida Drivers’ is easier than ‘Florida and Coastal regions of Georgia Drivers’.)
I don’t know why they hate themselves.Report
I’d guess that Florida doesn’t hate Florida, but Floridians hate other Floridians. The state is in a civil war that parallels the Civil War – imported Yankees versus Southerners. Relatedly, I bet that all of Illinois but Chicago hates Chicago, but the Chicagoans who hate Indiana outnumber them.Report
Some of these would be more accurate as “which states gives you an inferiority complex?”Report
I don’t see why you’d be intimidated by Texas… is it the attitudes toward zoning?Report
There’s zoning in Texas? #ThatsNewsToMeReport
There ain’t none. But there sure as hell are attitudes toward it!Report
I’m glad you noted that New Jersey hates everyone. When I first looked at the legend, I thought it was “hates South Dakota”. Don’t get me wrong; I’d admire them for their specificity, but I just didn’t understand it.Report
Have you ever been to the florida panhandle? They don’t call it the redneck riveria for no reason. Now, while I’m a guy that grew up in the west, it was the rural west…but I’ve been to the panhandle and redneck is the correct term. Beaches nice though 🙂Report
My (unscientific and anecdotal) sense is that the most populous corner of Illinois (by which I mean Chicago and the collar counties) hates downstate Illinois more than it hates any of its neighbors, including Indiana. It probably lumps downstate Illinois with Indiana and looks condescendingly at northwest Indiana.
My guess with Colorado is that Texas ranks a (sometimes close, sometimes not so close) second when it comes to which state to hate. New York is probably third. New Jersey might be fourth but that’s probably because there’s a sense that they’re expected to hate NJ, not that they have any strong feelings about that state one way or the other. The plains states probably come in next.Report
Chicagoans consider anything from Colorado to Pennsylvania as downstate / Indiana.Report
My recollections over the last 30 years is that Coloradans don’t hate Texas, they hate individual Texans. Particularly those visiting Colorado. If a skier runs wild and crashes through a crowd, the automatic assumption is that it’s a Texan. When the new owner of a ranch up in one of the mountain valleys shoots up his neighbor’s bison herd, the automatic assumption is that it’s a Texan. Sometime in the last few years I was sitting someplace with local news on the TV and they reported one of the forest fires had been started by someone camping illegally, burning an open fire during a ban, and didn’t douse it properly before they left. I heard a person behind me mutter, “Fncking Texans.”Report
Californians used to hate Texas because of the way the Cowboys kicked our football teams around, so they must have polled mostly retirees who’d remember that.Report
Who, then, do average Californians actually hate? “Precious, quirky, preachy Oregonians” is certainly a candidate, but I assure you everything aggravating about Oregonians (by which is usually meant “Portlanders”) is doubled when you find a Seattleite, with an extra dash of tech-money arrogance to boot.Report
Im the North, we hate the South.
The South pays no attention to us, so I have no idea who they hate in general. At the moment, the Astros and Red Sox.Report